The Small Fortune of Dorothea Q (4 page)

One by one, Gran named the rest of the eight Quint boys: ‘Fine, fine, boys, but wild. Dead and gone. ‘Cept one. Freddy now, the youngest, he was the wildest. Humphrey the studious one, my husband. Them Quint boys ...’ She sighed. ‘We lived round the corner from them, in Waterloo Street, me and me sister. You could see their house from my room upstairs. Handsome boys, all of them. Every man jack gone off to war. Look.’

She turned the page to show me a photo of the several young men dressed as soldiers, all lined up and smiling into the camera. There were more photos, of young men in uniform. Again, she named them.

‘Humphrey, William, Gordon, Charles, Leopold, Rudolph, Percy and Frederick. All a-them run off to fight Hitler. Except Humphrey. Charley, he get killed in Singapore. Freddy, now…’

But instead of telling me about Freddy, she flipped the page. There was a portrait of the man at the other end of the row, presumably the eldest Quint brother.

‘Humphrey. Me dear husband. Dead and gone.’

On the last page was a photo of a thin-faced white man with a walrus moustache, staring straight into the camera with pale eyes that, had the photo been in colour, would most certainly be blue.

‘Maximilian von Quindt,’ said Gran. ‘Quindt with a
d.
The first of the British Guiana Quints. A German; a zoologist who came to study turtles. He marry a black woman and drop the
von
and the
d.
All the rest come down from he.’

In spite of the obligation to remain youthfully bored by her old-lady ramblings, I was intrigued. I took the album onto my lap and leaned in, turned back the pages, peered into those faces, those eyes. Who were all these people long dead? They were the ones who went before me; if not for them there would have been no me. They had been living, breathing, moving human beings, filled with life and love, moved by emotions and passions, just as aware of their own lives as I was of mine, and unaware that one day in the distant future a young girl carrying their genes named Inky would be looking at their images and wondering about them; just as one day, perhaps, a hundred years from now, some descendent of mine would look at my image and wonder about me. The ephemeral, fragile nature of life on earth struck me like a hammer-blow – they were once here and now they were gone. And how many other faceless, nameless ancestors had gone before them? People of whom no photos existed; melted into the shadows of history! For the first time ever I felt a connection to the line of ancestry that went before me; my life was simply one little leaf in a huge spreading tree whose roots spread far into the past and branches would reach far into the future. A shudder of excitement went through me …

Gran snapped the album shut. ‘Everybody in that book dead and gone, except me and me chirren and you Greatuncle Rudolph, in Canada. Dead and gone, ashes to ashes. Ah well. We all gotta die one day. Now, child, hand me those albums over there. Those two t’ick ones.’

Something about Gran made you obey. I shook off my sentimental musings and got up, picked up the ‘tick’ albums she’d pointed to, and handed them both to her. They were each at least two inches thick; one newer and the other older, battered like the suitcase. She opened the newer one. I expected yet more old photos, but I was wrong.

It was filled with stamps, most of them arranged in neat rows, but several of them loose and falling out, some in sheets or groups of four or five, some on envelopes, first day covers, bright, beautiful stamps, from all over the world. She knew the country names by heart, and pointed them out to me: Ethiopia. New Zealand. Iceland. Bolivia. She looked at only one or two pages before shutting it and picking up the old album.

This album seemed not just old but ancient. Its green cardboard covering was cracked and dog-eared, the spine fractured. But she touched it as if it were sacred.

‘The family heirloom,’ she whispered, and opened it.

I was disappointed. For an heirloom, the album held nothing of beauty, nothing of appeal. No beautiful foreign stamps, no first day covers; the stamps in here were all from British Guiana, and they looked cheap and insignificant, bland and musty in their monotony, primitive in their production. She pointed to one particularly ugly stamp on the last page.

‘Theodore Quint’s – your great grandfather!’ she said. ‘Very valuable!’ She launched into some convoluted story of its origin; I listened with half an ear.

‘A hundred and fifty years old!’ Gran whispered. ‘Very precious. Worth millions. An heirloom. I holding it for the next generation.’

She closed the album, placed a hand on it as if in blessing, then clasped it to her breast.

‘Very, very precious,’ she repeated. And in her eyes I recognised a new glint.

I’d seen it before, not too long ago, on the big screen. Gollum’s glint.

L
ater that evening
I fled the house, leaving Gran to Mum and Marion. I slammed the front door, hurrying out to the pavement before Gran could somehow recall me. There I stopped, rummaged in my shoulder bag, pulled out my pack of pre-rolled fags and a lighter. I lit one, and, sitting on the garden wall, smoked it right down to the filter. That was good.

Mum detested my smoking and had done her level best to stop me from starting; but I had anyway, and now I was hooked, and she had to accept it. But she had her rules: no smoking within the house. Not even in my own room. Never, under her roof, she said. I always protested, ‘But actually it’s
my
roof!’

Which was true. In a twinkle of good sense Dad had put the house – which he had inherited from his mother – into my name before going berserk with his crazy trading and eventually losing everything else. He’d never re-mortgaged it, which had saved us from ruin; because it was only through re-mortgaging the house that Mum had got rid of a huge chunk of Dad’s debt. The Docklands loft, of course, had been repossessed. So it was, indeed, my house, but only in name. Rather, it was the bank’s. Mostly.

‘Who pays the mortgage?’ was all Mum ever said to my homeowner claims. That shut me up.

I crushed the cigarette stub on the wall, chucked it into the wheelie-bin conveniently waiting for next-day collection, and set off on a jog down Cricklade Avenue towards Streatham High Road. I couldn’t wait to see Sal.

Salvatore Zoppolo – to use his full name – was my best friend. We’d been part of an inseparable foursome for longer than I could remember – me, Tony, Sal and Cat. Tony’d been my boyfriend, Sal Cat’s. And then Cat’s parents had moved to Australia and she’d gone with them, and Tony – well, Tony had got himself a new girlfriend while still officially with me. It was my first dumping by a boyfriend ever. Utterly devastating. Sal, in the throes of getting over Cat’s desertion by playing the field, lent me a shoulder to cry on. We became the best of friends.

After a while Sal got tired of drinking himself into a stupor with a different girl each weekend, and I got tired of wallowing in a swamp of self-pity. We both grew up, and so did our friendship. I found there the kind of familiarity I should have had with a girl friend, and I’d had with Cat. But all my former friends had drifted off into their own world, and most of all, they all drank – too much.

I loathed drunkenness. In the year before his death, Dad’s alcoholism had sometimes led to violence, and now the very smell of strong liquor made me retch. Friends thought I was a prissy bore for not drinking, I thought they were juvenile. Only Sal had the time and, now, after six months of bingeing, the sobriety, to get to know the real me.

He was waiting for me at Wong’s, and had already ordered – he knew me well enough to know what I’d want. I slipped into the seat opposite him and let out a deep sigh of relief.

‘Mum’s crazy. Stark raving mad!’ I said.

Sal pushed away the strand of hair that always fell over his eyes. His father was Italian, his mother English, and his dark good looks turned female heads and kept male predators away from me. I still grieved for Tony, and Sal provided perfect platonic protection.

‘I thought it was your Nan who was crazy? That’s what you said on the phone …’

‘Yeah, but Mum’s crazy for setting herself up. Agreeing to take on Gran. Might as well get a job in the lunatic asylum! She’ll never manage. She’s scatty enough as it is; how’s she going to cope?’

‘Maybe you underestimate her.’

‘Nope. Mum’s as scatter-brained as they come. She just about manages to keep the two of us going, and only with my help. How’s she going manage Gran as well?’

‘With your help!’

‘Exactly! That’s the trouble. She knew from the start that Gran’ll end up
my
responsibility. It’s started already.’

‘Tell me about it.’

And so I did. Wong’s teenage son placed plates of steaming noodles before us, and while we ate I gave Sal a rundown of the day, putting in some catty Gran-mimicry to get a few laughs from him – the way she chewed her cud, the way she clacked her false teeth, her accent, her claws, her myriad boring albums and her Limacol-patting. Then I got to great-great-great-I-don’t-know-how-many-greats-grandfather’s-or-whoever’s stamp album.

‘Worth millions!’ I said, rolling my eyes in mockery. Sal held up a hand and stopped me.

‘Maybe it really is very valuable. If it’s that old and rare.’

‘Ha! You should see the stamps in it – falling to pieces. And even if they weren’t, they’re nothing special. Just very primitive everyday stamps, nothing artistic or anything. And from British Guiana, a little backwater country nobody ever heard of. Who cares?’

‘Still – you never know. I’d get it valued if I were you. A philatelist might give you a couple of hundred for it.’

‘But even if so – she’d never sell it. It’s an
heirloom.
A precious heirloom!’

I mimicked Gollum, clasping an imaginary album to my breast and rolling my eyes suspiciously around the restaurant. I couldn’t help it. My frustration with Gran, with the whole situation, found an outlet in mockery.

‘My preciousss!’

Sal laughed. He reached out and laid a hand on mine. ‘She sounds a card, this grandmother of yours. I’d like to meet her. And I’d like to see this heirloom. One of my uncles collects stamps. He might be interested in seeing them.’

‘With any luck she’ll leave it to me in her will.’

‘You’d better start sucking up to her, then!’

‘You bet! I can’t wait to get my hands on it – and start a really nice bonfire in the garden. What with Gran’s junk, and Mum’s, we could heat the whole of London for a year.’

Talking to Sal released some of the frustration I’d gathered over the day, and I calmed down. I felt guilty about the resentment I hoarded for Gran, and told him so. Sal was going to be a doctor, a neurologist – he was in his first year of medical studies – and was already good at dissecting people’s minds, if not their bodies. I was in a gap year, working full time before commencing law studies. I had been working hard and saving up to go travelling next year – then Gran burst into our lives. Now, everything was chaos, and I’d probably have to forget Asia. I’d have to stay and help Mum. I moaned on for a while, and then I moaned about my own moaning.

‘I’m sorry about all the whingeing,’ I said.

‘It’s normal,’ he comforted me. ‘You’re in your nice comfortable world, just you and your Mum, and your grandmother is threatening to disrupt it. That’s all there is to it.’

‘I know, I know. But there’s more to it. I feel I should – I don’t know – feel
love
for her, or something. She’s my own grandmother, after all. The only one I ever had. And I used to love her, when I was small. It’s all gone. And the way she kept all those letters, and photos. It’s quite sweet, actually. I mean, I threw out her letters to me long ago. It means she actually
cares.
I ought to be feeling
something.
Touched, or something. But I don’t. All I feel is irritation, and the need to escape. I wish I could love her. But I can’t. I don’t even
like
her.’

‘Love isn’t a
duty,
Inky. Technically she’s a stranger. She might be your flesh and blood but try persuading your mind that you
have
to love her! You’ll have to get to know her properly. Give her a chance, practice patience and tolerance, and …’

‘You sound like a preacher or something. Or like Mum. For all Mum’s scattiness, she’s good with people. If she does feel any resentment towards Gran, she hardly ever shows it.’ I remembered their first icy moments, and added, ‘Not much, anyway.’

‘But you said they were estranged?’

‘Well, physically separated, for thirty years or so. I suppose you can call that estrangement. It seems they had a quarrel a long time ago and Mum ran away and never went back, and never even wrote. But I think it’s
life
that kept Mum away more than any hard feelings. When my aunt asked her if she could take Gran in she said yes immediately. She never once hesitated, never once doubted it was the right thing to do, she was just one hundred per cent ‘yes’. So I guess it’s all forgiven and forgotten.

‘Mum’s strange in that way. She’s scatty and negligent on everyday matters, but totally
there
when it comes to people and her responsibilities towards them. It’s just amazing, the way she stuck with Dad, through all his troubles.’

I paused, remembering. They had been together a long time, gone through all the highs and lows. They met when she was only sixteen, travelled together, parted, got back together, parted again, married in England. They had gone through miscarriages together, and poverty, and wealth, and his infidelity. Through thick and thin, poverty and wealth, sickness and health; and alcoholism, in her eyes, was just another sickness. She’d never once considered divorce; apparently
stand by your man
was Mum’s watchword. Any other woman would have dumped him. But she really thought she could heal him; with love, with Yoga and religion and all her weird Eastern practices. She couldn’t, of course. He was too far gone for that. But she tried her best.

‘Like I said – don’t underestimate your mother. I think she’s great, the way she pulled through. And she didn’t do too bad a job of raising you, you know. I think she knows what she’s doing. I bet she knew exactly what she let herself into with your Nan, and she’ll get through it.’